EDMONTON — Lester “Baby Face” Nelson was a notorious gangster and bank robber in the ’20s and ’30s who hung with one of the great shooters of his day, John Dillinger.
Ryan “Baby Face” Nugent-Hopkins is a notorious (penalty) killer currently robbing the Dallas Stars of their Stanley Cup dreams, who runs with one of the great shooters of the current day.
“He’s the best player in this series,” Draisaitl declared after Nugent-Hopkins delivered two sweet assists in a 4-1 thriller (two Oilers empty-netters) that sends Edmonton to a Game 5 in Dallas, just one win away from a return trip to the Stanley Cup Final.
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Nugent-Hopkins, the longest-serving Oiler whose playoff beard takes us all back to our high school yearbooks, has at least two points in every game of this series, and nine in total. He put one on Draisaitl’s tape for the game-opening goal from Draisaitl’s office, then made a silky move to feed Corey Perry for the game-winner, both on the powerplay.
Nobody talked about Nugent-Hopkins when this series opened. But let’s face it, on a team with Connor McDavid, Draisaitl, Evan Bouchard and others, we don’t spill a lot of ink over RNH at any time of year.
Until he outplays Mikko Rantanen, Jason Robertson, Jamie Benn and Roope Hintz by a country mile, that is, or sits with nine points in four games while Tyler Seguin leads the entire Stars roster with three.
With Florida and Edmonton each choking out their opponents here in the Conference Finals, Nugent-Hopkins leads Round 3 in assists (seven), points (nine), even strength points (five) and plus-minus (plus-six), fronting an Oilers penalty kill that gave up three goals in Game 1 and has gone seven-for-eight in the rest of the series.
“He touches every part of the game you can think of,” Draisaitl said. “Nuggy, in a way, sacrifices a lot of offence throughout the year for doing everything the right way, and being in the right position. Doing all the little things that a lot of guys don’t want to do. We all know that he’s capable of putting up numbers, of scoring, and making great plays.
“Right now, it’s everything at once. It’s clicking, and he’s been the best player in the series.”
How many first overall draft picks has this franchise been granted over the years? Answer: three in a row from 2010-12 and McDavid in ’15, all different guys with different ceilings.
Taylor Hall is slugging it out in Carolina still, a viable support scorer who will play his 1,000th game one day in his seventh uniform, for a Hurricanes team that can’t quite figure it out.
Nail Yakupov barely played, and McDavid well, you might have heard of him.
Somehow, Nugent-Hopkins became a guy who isn’t great at any one thing, but excellent at most everything.
He’ll never compete in the beard-growing contest at the local Klondike Days festival, but if McDavid ever accepted the Cup from Gary Bettman, chances are Burnaby Nuge would be next in line, a beloved figure here in Edmonton who will likely play his career out as an Oiler.
On a Tuesday night in Edmonton, still 20 degrees Celsius and the sky nowhere close to dark at 9:45 p.m., the fans honked giant truck horns and cheered outside the window on Stony Plain Road, as Nugent-Hopkins shared a post-game press conference table with Draisaitl.
“It just keeps getting better and better. I mean, it’s … It’s unbelievable,” Nugent-Hopkins said, nodding towards his people outside the window at Rogers Place. “It’s kind of hard to wrap your head around sometimes, how unbelievable this fan base is. It seems like every series, every game, they get louder in (the rink). There’s more people out on the streets before and after. It’s just you feel the support.”
The spotlight here seldom strays from Nos. 97 and 29, which guys like Nugent-Hopkins and Zach Hyman — who injured his wrist on a hit by Mason Marchment and left the game in the first period — probably don’t mind.
But as badly as the big boys want a Stanley Cup on their resume for all the legacy reasons that the hockey world demands, it’s a different vibe for a B.C. kid who grew up a Pavel Datsyuk fan.
He was, like all No. 1 picks, supposed to be a saviour. In the end, he survived the back half of the Decade of Darkness before the Datsyuk came out in him, alongside a wrist shot that isn’t too far off the one Burnaby Joe Sakic released with such grace and accuracy back in the day.
“When I first came in, we were obviously a struggling team, but you never really felt the negativity too much in the city,” he said. “There was still a lot of positivity and a lot of hope, and now we’re one win away from going back-to-back Stanley Cup Finals.
“I mean, this is as exciting as it gets for us as a team and also for the fan base that’s stuck around through a lot of years.”
Edmonton just saw Dallas’s best game, weathered the storm early, and for the second straight contest allowed just four Stars shots on goal in the third period.
Stuart Skinner was better than Jake Oettinger — again — and the Oilers, it seems, won’t be denied their second crack at those pesky Florida Panthers.
It’s all unfolding the way they said it would back in 2011, when the skinny kid with the baby face arrived to save the day.
“It never gets old,” Nugent-Hopkins said. “It just keeps getting better.”
